Roy Cooper Senate Campaign Relies on Recycled Social Media Photos as Candidate Shuns Spotlight
Audrey Fahlberg
October 24, 2025
National Review
On October 7, 2025, Senate Democratic candidate and former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper posted a selfie on X that included a middle-aged woman and the caption: “I wouldn’t be here today without all of you stepping up and supporting this campaign. Thank you for your support.”
The post was unremarkable in its content, except for the fact that Cooper had posted the exact same photo in a May 2024 photo dump for “Teacher Appreciation Week” while he was governor under an account that is now run by his Democratic successor, Josh Stein.
…[T]he frequency with which Cooper’s campaign posts recycled photos is indicative of how little campaigning he’s done since announcing his Senate run.
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Cooper has kept his public appearances to a minimum since he formally launched his 2026 campaign in late July[.]
On July 30, Cooper’s campaign account posted a photo with a veteran that he’d taken as governor in May 2024. In a Labor Day post celebrating “the hardworking people across North Carolina who make our state and our economy strong,” Cooper’s campaign used a photo he’d included in a “Happy New Year” photo dump the prior year. In a health-care focused September post accusing “DC Republicans” of cutting Medicaid to “give tax breaks to their wealthy friends,” the Senate hopeful’s campaign again used a recycled photo of the former governor and a constituent that was first posted online in December 2023.
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But his campaign schedule is light in comparison to many other 2026 Senate candidates. The bunker campaign strategy is reminiscent of Senate Democratic leaders’ approach to the North Carolina Senate race when… [i]n 2019... Jeff Jackson… discussed how he’d told Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer he was going to do “100 town halls in 100 days” to get a pulse on the electorate ahead of a potential run.
“Wrong answer,” Schumer responded…“We want you to spend the next 16 months in a windowless basement raising money and then we’re going to spend 80 percent of it on negative ads about Tillis.”
…On September 27, for example, Cooper posted a series of photos with volunteers in Western North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene ravaged neighborhoods in fall of last year, killing more than a hundred people. Cooper’s campaign account has since posted photos of the candidate wearing the same exact outfit on the same field on numerous occasion in posts with vague captions, including on October 10, October 11, October 14, and October 18.
His campaign’s social media is replete with several other instances of vaguely captioned posts with photos from his time as governor. That strategy explains his new account photo on X, which is currently a snapshot of him surveying hurricane damage – but a look at the governor’s social media archives reveals that the photo was taken in 2018 following Hurricane Florence.
…[I]t’s also notable how often the Cooper campaign has declined to comment on major political developments and policy debates in recent months, including on transgender-related issues, and the North Carolina supreme court’s recent rulings on COVID-era lawsuits. Cooper also took nearly two weeks to issue a statement via a spokeswoman about the violent murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail[.]
Read more here.
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